Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass Read Free Book Online

crosses, the daisies almost grow again. They cover the names: Salvador, José, Rosita, Panchito, Paz,
    Sometimes in winter, but rarely, snow falls. It forms an unlikely icing on the tops of adobe walls and red clay pots. It piles up on the branches of pepper trees and freezes the geraniums. Icicles hang from the corrugations of the roof. The magueys, usually wreathed in shirts and dresses hung out to dry, now shine with snow like any pine or fir. Only a few remember the last time. Don Bernardino, who grew up on an hacienda before the revolution and can’t read or write, says it was forty years ago. He says, “There was ice an inch thick in the water bucket. My pinto calf died.” Then he forgets the phenomenon at hand, the blanched fields, the capped mountaintops, and says, “As soon as we were twelve, we went with the men into the fields. We worked from sunrise to sunset, fourteen hours in summer. They paid us in lard and beans.”
    The three plum trees flower in February, when it is sometimes winter and sometimes spring. Their knotted branches support profusions of white. “They are like wedding veils,” says Angela, who never married. If it turns cold, the blossoms may freeze before the buds set. If one night’s wind rattles the roof and shrieks at the door, by next morning the shriveling petals will lie in a thick mat on the ground.
    These winds rush up the canyons and tear branches from the trees. They snatch off sombreros and the cardboard that covers the chicken shed. Concha, who will complete her seventy-fifth year in April, is crouched in the sun against the peeling wall of the post office. She watches a half-smoked cigarette blow over the cobbles to her feet. She lights it with a wax match from the box in her apron pocket.
    Sucking in the smoke before the wind takes it, she regards the plaza where unnamed dogs skirmish among the drooping callas. Leaves and scraps of paper have been caught up in a whirlwind of dust and carried over walks and cement benches to the door of the church, where they are deposited just as the parish priest comes out. His habit is lifted by a gust, disclosing brown gabardine trousers. He makes for the post office and notices Concha, who rises with difficulty from her shelter to kiss his hand.
    Summer comes suddenly, and all the desert turns oasis. Every afternoon cumulus clouds pile up over the mountains. The apocalyptic sky is referred to as pretty. “How pretty,” says the store-keeper, who pastures three cows in an arid field on the outskirts of town. “How pretty,” says the carpenter’s wife, dragging a tin tub to catch the possible runoff from the roof.
    When there is a storm, the thunder rolls up the mountain and down the cobbled street. It stifles the backfire of the passing truck and silences the church bell ringing for vespers. It mutters imprecations in the distance. The lightning forks into an ash tree, into the windmill tower, and finally into the transformer, causing a power failure that may last all night. In the flash there is a second’s eternity of total exposure, the plow left in the furrow, the dented pot on the fire, the woman’s face in the cracked mirror.
    The cloudburst that follows drenches the chickens and the cats. It drips through holes in roofs to muddy the dirt floors. It carries excrement to the arroyo, which is now in flood. It pours from the varied terrain of the hills in torrents and rivulets. It sweeps across open spaces in curtains of shifting density.
    When it is over, the obstinate ground yields to unsuspected seeds. Patches of short-stemmed flowers appear among the stones like colored lace. The air smells of wet clay and washed leaves. Children splash in pools and puddles. Some are barefoot, some wading in shoes. One little girl is soaking her turquoise-blue pumps. She has abandoned herself to laughter and doesn’t see the puppy shivering on the step. Or the damp red bird in its wooden cage on the wall. Or the first faint green spreading